This is an IGN opinion piece from Simon Cardy, who misses feeling young and so finds himself playing a lot of games that brought him happiness as a teenager. This is just one of those many games.
Look, I know the consensus is that Burnout 3: Takedown is the best one — it introduced the game-changing takedown mechanic to usher the series into a whole new era of dangerous driving, after all. But despite all that, I’ve always preferred Revenge. They say it’s a dish best served cold, so some 21 years later, long after the initial rubber-burning heat of its hype has died down, I put my disc back into my Xbox to see if it still holds the same magic.
Spoilers: Burnout Revenge is still extremely good.
The opening drum hits of All the Rage by Funeral for a Friend welcomed me back, and I couldn’t be happier. I’d just finished watching William Friedkin’s psychosexual body horror, Videodrome, so this mental transportation back to more innocent times was just what was needed. But I’ve already gone well off track here.
Crash mode is what I’ve always loved most about the Burnout series. It was the perfect tonic for a time when I only had a handful of games to play at any time, so chasing those high scores was something I’d do for hours on end, and sometimes even whole nights. Those short, repeatable bursts of action, whether it be causing a roundabout pile-up or flying off a ramp into an inexplicably arranged row of coaches, just never got old. Each different vehicle held its own value upon demise, so learning the best plan of attack as you began to learn the traffic patterns of each level became crucial — this wasn’t just mindless destruction, but a well-thought-out and genuinely novel approach to how driving games could be played.
Yes, there’s no denying the thrill of its races and eliminators, but causing as much carnage as possible while watching that dollar total tick up sets free a primal pulse of pleasure in my brain. But really, that’s enough allusions to Videodrome now. (In hindsight, Crash would have been a far better pick from the Canadian director’s filmography to pair with Criterion’s racer. That’s really enough of that now, though.)
The genius of crash mode is that it brought an unprecedented level of variety to a racing game that wouldn’t be seen again until the Forza Horizon series hit its stride a number of years after. It turned a ridiculously fast, instinctive racer into an ever so slightly more cerebral puzzle game. Yes, it still set vehicular violence to a rasping post-hardcore soundtrack, but this mode quite literally stopped to make you actually think during the period between you hitting the pause button and pressing restart. Getting those top scores and squeezing all of the collectible stars from each scenario was as fun as it got. The likes of Dangerous Driving and Dangerous Golf tried to bring back that same sensation, but the truth is, Burnout Revenge still remains the peak.
All of this is in Burnout 3, I grant you. But there’s one key addition developer Criterion installed in Revenge that made its more traditional race modes sing even better: Traffic checking. It added yet another incentive to want to slam into other vehicles, with cars (legally) driving on the same side of the road as you transformed into a resource to fill your boost bar with. Ideally, you never want that meter to hit zero when darting around a Burnout track, and traffic checking made that a thrilling reality. Ramming into the rear-end of vehicles traveling in the same direction as you made sure that flame never died out. “Rubbing is racing,” Robert Duvall famously says in Days of Thunder, and no other driving game has taken that philosophy to heart like Criterion’s 2005 masterpiece.
Not that I’ve done much actual racing in the few hours I’ve spent back in Burnout Revenge. The beauty is that you can make it through its career mode and onto the next of its fairly generic global settings by earning enough stars just through playing crash mode. So, that’s almost exclusively what I’ve been doing. I could be out enjoying the summer weather, but why would I do that when I can slam on that Crashbreaker button and explode the poor civilians between me and a new high score?
It’s been a relief to see my fond memories of Burnout Revenge haven’t been as rose-tinted as the sunny glow that sits atop most of its tracks. It’s still a fantastic game, and while the open-world Burnout Paradise certainly had its joys, the series just never got better than this, at least not in my opinion. I’m looking forward to dipping back into it over the next few weeks until Star Wars Galactic Racer finally gets here — a ferociously fast and dangerous project from former Burnout developers that has impressed us at IGN each and every time we’ve played it so far. It may not have a Crash Mode, but if some of that classic Criterion spirit shines through, then we’re in for a great time.
Games are good, innit.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
